August 29,2011 by jkay • Leave a Comment 
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We are pleased to announce that the Summer 2011 version of Workbooks is due to be released on Friday 2 September 2011. It includes a number of significant new features.

July 19,2011 by jcheney • Leave a Comment 
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19th July 2011 - Workbooks.com has secured a total investment of £5.4m from Angel investors. This business was able to raise the additional capital in less than 60 days, in part because Angel investors were able to take advantage of the recent EIS tax relief changes, which makes investing in business like Workbooks more tax efficient for private investors.

Following the commercial launch of the company 18 months ago, and an initial £4m investment, the latest £1.4m extends the commitment from investors to a total of £5.4m.

The funding will be used to accelerate sales growth in the UK and online, driving toward Workbooks main business objective to transform the IT landscape for SMEs.

John Cheney, CEO of Workbooks, commented: “Workbooks represents an ideal opportunity for an investor to be part of a start-up that is fuelling economic recovery in the UK. The majority of Venture Capital is investing in later stage businesses that offer lower risk and the Banks just aren’t lending. For Workbooks and its investors the EIS scheme and recent increase in tax relief was a major factor in this latest round of additional funding.”

Ian Calcutt, non-executive director and founder of Integralis Ltd, commented: “Workbooks.com is a business that has a clear understanding of the needs of the SME market, because it is a SME itself. The CRM solution it has developed can help businesses increase sales, improve customer retention and streamline business processes. By extending my investment I have the opportunity to help Workbooks sell more of its solutions to the SME market. This will in turn offer SMEs the opportunity to work more efficiently, encouraging success and growth for the UK. At the same time, the EIS tax relief on offer makes this an attractive deal for me.”

Workbooks has an incredibly strong offering for SMEs which has the potential to take advantage of a huge market. It is a sound example of the sort of technology-based innovation that the UK excels at.

“It is clear that many small and medium sized businesses want a better platform to manage their business success in the way that large enterprises do. There is a chasm of opportunity between what many SMEs are being sold as a CRM solution and what many SMEs actually need,” added Chris Howell, founder of DriveTech. “Workbooks fills that gap.”
 

July 05,2011 by kwells • Leave a Comment 
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The expectations and requirements of a CRM system for small and mid-sized organisations are similar to the deployment of a CRM system for a large corporate. The difference is that unlike larger organisations, smaller businesses tend to have limited resource available to them, in terms of both budgets, and time available to ensure the implementation of the CRM project is a success. 

We believe that there are a number of key factors that every SME should look for when purchasing a CRM solution. 

1. Usability

Consider how much time and money you are willing to spend on the implementation of your chosen CRM solution. An easy-to-use and intuitive system is likely to require less training, and therefore less money spent on ensuring your CRM deployment is a success. An intuitive solution is an effective solution, as it enables your salespeople to become competent far quicker which in turn helps your company benefit from a quick return on the investment. 

2. How easy is it to customise

Look for a solution that you can customise easily and one that enables you to capture all the information you need it to, without having to change your working processes too much. Organisations often have different terminology and terms for ultimately the same thing and although you should be open to change and new ways of working, having a solution that seamlessly integrates into your current working practice is priceless. 

3. Accessibility

Consider how accessible you want your CRM solution to be. Although on-premise solutions can have advantages, a web-based system will make it much easier for your sales team to enter data from anywhere, for instance at a trade show. A web-based solution will also enables them to access the system when working from home and on the move. This flexibility is key.

4. Easy to use reporting tools

Reporting forms an essential part of a CRM solution, helping you to make better, more informed decisions. Make sure your CRM solution not only allows you to quickly and easily create reports, but also allows you to generate and view the data in a useable format. Bear in mind that you may want to use your data elsewhere to perform further analysis, so a system that does not allow you to export your data into formats such as .XLS, .TXT or .CSV may prove to be very frustrating.

5. Scope for growth

Make sure the CRM solution you choose has the flexibility to grow with your business. Having a solution that is well equipped to deal with your needs as a ‘one man band’ is great, but as you grow and your business changes the last thing you want to be doing is starting the process of implementing a new CRM solution all over again. 

6. Easy to use data import and export tools

Most organisations will have existing customer data or information held somewhere. Whether this be spreadsheets or an existing CRM solution, it is probable that you will want at least some of this data imported into your new CRM system. With this in mind, a solution that supports an easy import of data is crucial. Similarly, the ability to export your data into a useable format, such as Excel or .CSV, at the click of a mouse is something every CRM solution should have. 

7. Availability of training

Regardless of how intuitive your chosen CRM solution is, many of us are naturally somewhat reluctant to change, and therefore training is key to ensure quick adoption throughout your workforce. It is important to identify whether training is available to you, and at a reasonable cost. 

8. Hidden support costs

Some CRM solutions can be deceptively inexpensive. Carefully consider the level of support that is included within your contract and make sure you are comfortable with the costs associated for any support that falls outside the terms of your contract. Too often organisations are lured in by low prices, and are shocked to discover several months later that they have to pay extra when they run into a problem they need help with.

9. API Integration

It is common for smaller organisations to run their business on multiple applications, for instance Microsoft Outlook, Google Apps or Sage accounting packages. Make sure your chosen CRM solution can integrate with the other applications your business uses to help create a streamlined approach.

10. A solution that caters to your business needs

As much as it’s important to ensure your CRM solution meets all your key requirements, as the saying goes, you also do not want to end up ‘using a sledgehammer to crack a nut’. Choosing an extravagant solution to solve a minor problem will prove overwhelming and will ultimately result in incurring unnecessary cost. Make sure you choose a solution that specialises in businesses of your size, and is ready to grow along side you.

June 06,2011 by kwells • Leave a Comment 
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Last Friday (3rd June) saw the successful deployment of the latest Workbooks release. The Spring 2011 release includes some fantastic  new functionality, including the ability to bulk update records using the import tool as well as ‘right-click’ functionality to support copy, paste and spell-checking. As always, the release also included a number of enhancements made to existing functionality and the resolution of several bugs. 

Some key areas of new functionality include:

Update through Import

You can now use Workbooks Import functionality to update fields on existing records. For example, data that has been taken out of Workbooks for cleansing can be imported and the amended data used to update  the existing information. Using the update mode you can choose between simply updating existing records or updating existing ones AND, if a record doesn’t already exist, creating a new one. Click here for more information.

Full Database Export

In response to customer requests it’s now possible for users with the appropriate capability to download their entire database. The data will be exported as a TGZ archive file, which is a compressed file, containing multiple CSV files which holds all the data about your different record types. Of course, we’ll continue to backup your data and keep it secure but now you have the added benefits of being able to choose to export your data too. You’ll find information on how to do this here.

Export to Excel and CSV

Previously there was a limit on the number of rows that can be exported to Excel  or to CSV (1,000 rows). Again, in response to customer requests, this limit has been removed so you can export data from grids much more easily.

Quick Start Guide

To make the initial set up of Workbooks easier, we’ve added a Quick Start Wizard to guide you through setting up your Own Organisation, including your Tax Regime, Home Currency, Foreign Currencies, Company Registration Number and Accounting Periods.  If you’ve already set up your database you won’t see this Wizard, although it will be available if you create a new database.

Spell-Checking functionality

One of the most popular enhancement requests we receive is to include a spell checker.  We’ve added access to the browsers right-click functionality, which allows you to copy and paste (rather than using Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V) and gives you access to the browsers spelling checker (Note, availability of spell checking is browser specific, a spell checker is included in Chrome, Firefox and Safari, for Internet Explorer you need to install a third party plug-in). To access this functionality on standard fields, use right click however when using the rich text editor you need to hold down the Control key (or Command key on a Mac) and right click the mouse.

Internet Explorer 9 support

Workbooks can be used with any of the main browsers:  Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Safari or Opera and up until now, for reasons of speed of performance, we’ve recommended using either Chrome or Safari.  This release adds support for the recently introduced Internet Explorer 9. Significant Performance improvements within Internet Explorer 9 allow us to now recommend it for use with Workbooks.

Email Roll-Up

On an Organisation record, we have extended the email tab so it now shows all emails sent to or from Employees of that Organisation. This allows you easily to see email correspondence between your staff and your customer in one place.

Other Enhancements

In addition to the aforementioned enhancements, many parts of the service have seen incremental improvement, often as a result of customer feedback. Where we have addressed specific customer requests our customer support team will be in touch to inform you that these changes have been implemented.

As ever, please continue to help drive our roadmap by contributing your suggestions on our Community site.

June 03,2011 by jkay • Leave a Comment 
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This may surprise some readers: we think it's important that it's as easy as possible for users to get all their data out of our service.

It's your data, after all.

People often don't think about how they can get data out of a product or service before the day that they want to leave or when they decide they need a local backup copy of their data.  Here are four important questions:

• Can you get all your data out?
• How much will it cost to get your data out?
• How hard will it be to get your data out?
• Will your data be left in a form which is easily used in other tools and services?

It's important that our service stands on its own merits.  We want to earn our customers' loyalty through developing a great service and constantly improving it.  If we ever stop delivering on this commitment we would - for good reason - start to lose customers.  So we are not in the business of making the data extraction process difficult.

Unfortunately - as our Professional Services engineers will attest - not all products or services make it easy for you to extract your data. They charge fees for special tools, passwords, or assistance, or make you jump through hoops such as a final upgrade, in order to get your data out.

Some of you will note the close similarity to the philosophy of Google's Data Liberation Front; as I've observed before this is all part of a commitment to open principles - we're pleased to acknowledge their work as an inspiration for our work here.

So: how does it work?

Assuming you have 'System Adminstration' capabilities, all you have to do is to navigate to the Export Database option in the Configuration area. Invoking this option delivers a compressed archive of all the data that is accessible by you: not just the main objects, but also data describing the relationships between them, plus your emails and notes. Everything is in as open a format as possible: for example CSV for the majority of data, HTML for notes.  Exactly as our own engineers would like to receive data extracted from other products.

June 02,2011 by jkay • Leave a Comment 
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Windows XP and Internet Explorer

May 31,2011 by kwells • Leave a Comment 
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Implementing a CRM system for any sort of business is not without its challenges, but for small and mid-size companies without dedicated IT teams or budgets it can be even more difficult.

We often come across organisations whom prior to implementing Workbooks have tried and failed to successfully implement an alternative solution. Having listened to the issues such organisations have faced, we've pulled together a list of 5 common mistakes SME's often make when implementing a CRM solution, and have offered some helpful advice on how these mistakes can be avoided. 

1. No Clarity on the Project Objectives

In order for any CRM project to be a success, there needs to be clarity on what success actually looks like.  We speak to many organisations who ‘feel’ they need a CRM system, but are not entirely sure what it could deliver and how it will benefit the business. 

We encourage these organisations to really consider what they are trying to achieve by investing in a CRM project and how their business might be different in 6-12 months with a successfully deployed solution. 

It is also important to recognise that different teams inside your business will have different and often competing priorities.  The sales team’s number one priority might be more leads, whilst the customer services team might feel that a new support system is more important.

In order to clarify all of this we recommend you ask three questions of the business. 

• What are the high level objectives?

• How would a system help me achieve these?

• How important are these objectives relative to each other?

A simple table like the one below can add real value by allowing everyone to understand the issues and help prioritise accordingly.

2. Lack of Executive Sponsorship

CRM projects cost time and money and may demand a change in working practices.  This means, that for any CRM project to be successful there must be the support from business leadership. By support we don’t just mean a willingness to sign the cheque (although clearly that helps!).

Business leaders must:

• Manage competing requirements and set clear business priorities.

• Clearly define the management information requirements. If the CRM system is really going to improve the business, it will need to deliver good quality KPI's, so the right people can make the right decisions. If the leadership clearly doesn't define their requirements early on in the project, the CRM project is unlikely to deliver its promise.

• Motivate others. In SME companies the company leadership tends to be intimately involved with the working of the company and the staff. If they don't see the CRM project as important, nobody else will.

3. Lack of User Involvement during Planning

Sometimes CRM initiatives are driven ‘top down’ with the business leadership keen to realise the value a good deployment can deliver.  (Which is great– see above). However, in the enthusiasm to get a system implemented, sometimes the people who actually use the system day to day don’t get properly consulted.

Common pitfalls here include: 

• Management decide that 'knowing this piece of information would be useful', however the overhead of inputting the data means it takes people twice as long to do their job.

• Users resent the 'new system' which is not what they are used to, and don't see the value it adds.

• Users don't feel like stakeholders and can be resistant to change.

Unlike larger organisations which may have business analysts and business process experts, in small organisations it is often the only people who really understand an existing business process are the users who actually do the work.  Therefore it is key to get users involved early in the project.

We would recommend establishing a project team right from the outset which includes managers and users.  We would also recommend you empower the users representatives to be ‘project champions’, tasked with explaining to their colleagues why the CRM project is being started, what value it delivers to the business and ensuring they get feedback on issues or concerns from their peers.   

4. Recreating existing processes in a new system

CRM projects are started because the existing systems and processes don’t deliver the desired result.  So implementing a new system (or software) which simply duplicates the existing processes is unlikely to improve things.  Implementing a new CRM system provides a great opportunity to review and improve underlying business processes.Again user engagement here can be key. We often find that when asked, people running a particular process or function can identify ways to improve it; given the opportunity and the right support. 

One of the challenges for SMEs is that most of the key processes such as order processing run across the organisation; starting in sales and marketing, progressing into an administration function, may involve a fulfilment team before finishing in finance.  Therefore it helps to identify which processes run within a department (such as sales forecasting) and which go across teams.  When a process runs across a business, it makes sense to get the stakeholders together to discuss how the process can be improved.  This doesn’t need to be complex and a good CRM vendor will help you with this process.  The key piece of advice here is: Be open-minded to changing your process to fit the solution, rather than spending a lot of money on customising the solution to fit your existing process.

5. Choosing the Wrong Partner

The CRM software market is relatively mature, so whether you are considering using Workbooks or one of our competitors such as Salesforce.com or Microsoft Dynamics, you will find that most applications provide a rich set of features. 

We would recommend you look beyond product functionality to see what else you might need to ensure your project delivers a return on your investment.

• Is price the most important factor?

• Do you need help with the design and implementation?

• Do you need user training?

• Do you need to migrate your data from a legacy system?

• Once it's in place will you need on-going support?

One of the most important factors for an SME should be to understand how much focus and support you are likely to get from your CRM provider.  Will your business be important to them and will they go the extra mile to ensure you are successful?  

May 12,2011 by kwells • Leave a Comment 
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On 9 May 2011, the Information Commissioner’s Office published initial guidance on the practical steps UK businesses need to take in order to comply with the new Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations. The Regulations govern the use of cookies or the placing or accessing of any information stored on a user's device. With so many businesses now using cookie’s to identify and track visitors across their websites we thought it important to highlight these new regulations.

When do the Regulations come into force?

The Regulations come into force on 26 May 2011. This legislation, derived from an amendment to the EU’s Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive, will require all organisations operating websites, as well as advertisers and ad networks, to obtain informed consent from their visitors when storing or accessing cookies (or other information) on their computers and mobile devices. The only exception to this rule is if the cookie is ‘strictly necessary’ for a service requested by the user. An example of this would be remembering the items an individual may have placed in their virtual baskets when purchasing items online. In such circumstances, no consent will be required.

What does the guidance say?

The guidance is intended to assist businesses in considering what type of cookie their websites use, the purpose of each cookie, how intrusive their use is, and offers some suggestions as to some recommended methods for obtaining consent from users. The purpose of the guidance is not to provide a definitive compliance guide but rather to act as a starting point for those businesses who are considering how to comply with the new legislation when it comes into force.

What do I need to do now?

Under the new Regulations, businesses should perform a comprehensive audit of their websites, filter out unnecessary cookies and identify any ‘strictly necessary’ ones that would not require consent because they fall under the exception. This guidance also encourages businesses to evaluate the intrusiveness of each cookie, and consider changing how the most intrusive of these cookies are used (e.g. asking whether it is necessary to use flash cookies which can be tricky to block).

Why should I bother?

The new Regulations grant other new powers to the ICO, including the power to serve monetary penalties of up to £500,000 to organisations that commit serious breaches of the Regulations, including making unwanted marketing phone calls or sending spam email. Individuals and businesses will also have a right to bring a claim for breaches of the Regulations. The ICO will issue separate guidance on how they intend to enforce the new Regulations.

It is also good business. Telling people what you are leaving or accessing on their computer or mobile helps build trust. Being transparent wins loyalty and engaging with customers by means of notice, choice and education empowers people and helps them manage their own privacy. It also protects your brand by avoiding being seen to be covert.

Some pointers

Whilst the ICO’s guidance is welcomed, businesses will need to be creative and consider, on a case-by-case basis, how they can best achieve compliance, without disrupting user experience. This will involve (amongst other things):

• reviewing their privacy policy;
• adopting a ‘layered’ approach to inform users about how your site works to gain valid consent;
• reviewing contracts with ad networks to apportion responsibility;
• conducting an audit of your digital estate and cookie functionality; and
• ensuring websites are compatible with next generation browsers.

This article was written by Pitmans. For further details, please contact Philip James on 0207 634 4655 or email pjames@pitmans.com

April 22,2011 by jkay • Leave a Comment 
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Amazon have suffered a number of problems in the last couple of days. Disturbingly it seems that Amazon's concept of separate "availability zones" - parts of their infrastructure which should be completely unaffected in the event of issues elsewhere - may not have delivered as planned.  As a result a number of high-profile websites have been knocked off the net: it's been fashionable to host infrastructure on the "public cloud" and the Web 2.0 crowd have suffered this week.

Almost exactly a year ago I wrote about our approach to achieving reliability and our approach to using third-parties within our infrastructure; it's worth reiterating now:

Basically, we think that the cloud model is something which works - brilliantly - where there's a simple customer/supplier relationship but that it can break down when there are hierarchies of services unless you think very carefully about how you will deal with the contingencies. It's a little different from traditional business relationships where you have the luxury of at least a little time to sort out most issues: we need our infrastructure to be always available and reliable. We don't want to be involved in trying to diagnose a third-party infrastructure (like EC2) and having the responsibility to sort out issues within it without having the ability to do so.

So we took a different route. We built our own infrastructure and we are responsible for its management - right down to the hardware. Although we do use third parties for some of the components, there is always redundancy: multiple networks, multiple locations. If a provider fails to deliver a service we can call on an alternative so we can be certain we can deliver the service levels we commit to in our SLA. Maybe we will use some Amazon services in the future but if we do they'll be non-core and we'll be sure to have a backup plan.

 

In the meantime, we can see that our approach has worked and we are able to report some excellent availability statistics for the past twelve months.   We are not complacent and we do not take this for granted: we will continue to be as proactive as we can to reduce risk further.
 
I will be interested to read Amazon's post-mortem analysis of what went wrong to see what we can learn from this.
 

April 22,2011 by jkay • Leave a Comment 
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Ensuring that our service is available for use whenever our customers need it is our top priority.

There are two parts to this: reducing unscheduled downtime (outages) and also reducing the scheduled variety.

Beginning with the unscheduled variety, in the last 12 months we've achieved a headline availability of 99.997% (this is 14 minutes). In reality we did a little better than that:

• 9 minutes was a DNS issue with our provider: they suffered a 'DDoS' attack which took some time to mitigate - because DNS results are cached most users would not have noticed this unless they were attempting to login at the time.
• 5 minutes was due to four network 'blips' of between 1 and 2 minutes, two of which were between 1AM and 2AM and due to out of hours engineering work by a third-party. Because of the client-server nature of the Workbooks Desktop few users will have noticed these either.

Playing a little loose with the numbers, if you consider the 6am - 12 midnight period and exclude the DNS issue which affected less than 5% of our users then we delivered 99.9995% availability: I have to admit this will be tough to maintain.

The other variety is scheduled downtime: this happens when we are upgrading our systems, it's planned and announced in advance and done outside working hours. We also look to reduce this as much as possible - most upgrades now take just a few minutes.